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Recurrent Miscarriage: Caused by Being 'Super Fertile?'

Recurrent miscarriage is an extremely frustrating phenomena for women and couples. Being able to get pregnant and then losing the pregnancy is not easily explained nor understood.

But now a new study may shed more light on why some women experience recurrent miscarriage — it is because they are "super fertile" and able to get pregnant easily. The theory is that a woman who is "super fertile" may have a uterus that allows embryos that would not normally survive to implant and last long enough so there is a positive pregnancy test. The researchers hypothesized that human endometrial stromal cells of women with recurrent miscarriage are not discriminating between high-and low-quality human embryos.

The UK-Dutch study — "Endometrial Stromal Cells of Women with Recurrent Miscarriage Fail to Discriminate between High- and Low-Quality Human Embryos" — was conducted at Princess Anne Hospital in South Hampton and the University Medical Center Utrech, and it was published in PLoS One.

The researchers took endometrial samples from the lining of the wombs of 12 women — six of whom had normal fertility and six of whom had recurrent miscarriages. They placed high- and low-quality embryos in the uterine cells. The uterine cells of women with an uncomplicated fertility history grew toward the high-quality embryos only, while the uterine cells of women who had suffered multiple miscarriages grew toward both high and low quality embryos.

The authors say more research is needed to determine how low-quality embryos lnhibit the migration of uterine cells and how this is disrupted in women with recurrent miscarriage. The research may also open the door to tests being developed that can identify the condition in women.